‘Perhaps it is only in childhood,’ Graham Greene writes in his essay ‘The Lost Child’, that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already...But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much.
The desire in childhood reading, Greene tells us, is for experiences we haven’t yet had; as children we are not just lacking these experiences, we are not yet ready for them; because they are what we want, they are what we want to know about. What the child divines in the book is what he may be capable of; childhood is developing of an appetite for future possibility. We know more about the experiences we don’t have than about the experiences we do have. Though it is, as we shall see, a strange kind of knowing; and it goes back a long way.”
Phillips, A., 2013. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, London: Penguin Books, pp.118-119.
